Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Until late in 1942, Eighth Army in North Africa was poorly supported by the RAF. Air force leadership was institutionally hostile to providing ‘flying artillery’ for soldiers, and only sluggishly evolved liaison techniques such as the Luftwaffe had practised since 1939. Churchill strongly defended the RAF’s right to an independent strategic function, asserting that it would be disastrous to turn the air force into ‘a mere handmaid of the Army’. But it proved mistaken to permit the airmen such generous latitude in determining their own priorities. Close air support for ground forces was slow to mature.

  One of the most damaging errors of aircraft production policy was ‘the tendency to bridge over waiting periods for new types delayed in development by means of “stop-gap” orders for older types’, in the words of an official historian. ‘Three aircraft especially, the Battle, the Blenheim and Whitley, were repeatedly ordered long after the replacement date originally set for them had arrived.’ There was a mistaken belief that it must be better to provide the RAF with any aircraft than none. Yet Battles and Blenheims, especially, added nothing to British combat power, and merely provided coffins for the unfortunate aircrew obliged to fly them in 1940—41. Whitley bombers remained in production until mid-1943, even though the RAF latterly ceased to sacrifice them over Germany. Better planes were coming. Aircraft design proved one of Britain’s real successes in the second half of the war. But in 1942 there were still pathetically few of the new Mosquito and Lancaster bombers, or of upgraded models of the Spitfire and Hurricane. Almost all the latest types were deployed at British airfields, rather than in support of the army’s battles in the Middle and Far East.

  ‘In all its branches, the German war machine appeared to have a better and tighter control than our army,’ wrote Alan Moorehead. ‘One of the senior British generals said to the war correspondents…“We are still amateurs. The Germans are professionals.” ’ This was an extraordinary admission in mid-1942. The army’s performance improved during the latter part of that year. But, to prevail over the Germans, British—and American—forces continued to require a handsome superiority of men, tanks and air support.

  There remained one great unmentionable, even in those newspapers most critical of Britain’s military performance: the notion that, man for man, the British soldier might be a less determined fighter than his German adversary. The ‘tommy’ was perceived—sometimes rightly—as the victim of his superiors’ incompetence, rather than as the bearer of any personal responsibility for failures of British arms. In private, however, and among ministers and senior officers, this issue was frequently discussed. George Marshall deplored the manner in which Churchill spoke of the army’s Other Ranks as ‘the dull mass’, a phrase which reflected the prime minister’s limited comprehension of them. There was an embarrassing moment at Downing Street when following a cabinet meeting Randolph Churchill joined a discussion about the army, and shouted: ‘Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t fight.’ Churchill once observed of his son: ‘I love Randolph, but I don’t like him.’ It was astonishing that, in the midst of debates about great matters, he indulged his son’s presence, and expected others to do so. On this occasion, however, Randolph’s intervention might have been hyperbolic, but was to the point. Many British officers perceived their citizen soldiers as lacking the will and commitment routinely displayed by the Germans and Japanese. Underlying the conduct of Churchill’s wartime commanders was a fundamental nervousness about what their men would, or would not, do on the battlefield.

  Churchill understood that if British troops were to overcome Germans, they must become significantly nastier. This represented a change of view. In 1940 he favoured civility towards the enemy, reproaching Duff Cooper as Minister of Information for mocking the Italians: ‘It is a well-known rule of war policy to praise the courage of your opponent, which enhances your own victory when gained.’ Likewise in January 1942 he declared his admiration for Rommel on the floor of the House of Commons: ‘a very daring and skilful opponent…and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general’. Progressively, however, the prime minister came to think it mistaken to suggest that Axis soldiers were honourable foes. Such courtesies encouraged British troops to surrender too readily. As the war matured, Churchill deplored newspaper reports of chivalrous German behaviour: ‘These beastly Huns are murdering people wholesale in Europe and have committed the most frightful atrocities in Russia, and it would be entirely in accordance with their technique to win a reputation for treating British and American soldiers with humanity on exceptional and well-advertised occasions.’

  In the spring and summer of 1942, Churchill was right to believe that the British Army’s performance in North Africa was inadequate. Many of his outbursts about the soldiers’ failures, which so distressed Brooke and his colleagues, were justified. It remains debatable whether remedies were available, when positions of military responsibility must perforce be filled from the existing pool of regular officers. Most were captives of the culture to which they had been bred. Its fundamental flaw was that it required only moderate effort, sacrifice and achievement, and produced only a small number of leaders and units capable of matching the skill and determination of their enemies. The army’s institutional weakness would be overcome only when vastly superior Allied resources became available on the battlefield.

  2 Home Front

  The secretary of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee one day took Leo Amery aside in the Commons smoking room. He told the India Secretary there was deep restlessness among MPs, ‘because they did not feel that there was anyone inside the Cabinet who stood for the Conservative point of view at all’. This was largely true. Almost everything about Britain’s wartime domestic policies seemed socialistic. Centralisation, planning, rationing and regulation were fundamental to mobilisation of the nation’s resources, to fair distribution of food, fuel, clothing. Every British citizen cursed wartime bureaucracy, transport shortages, queues, the relentlessly dispiriting influence of the blackout, the food and privileges still available to those with money to pay for them. But the country was, for the most part, notably well administered. For this the prime minister deserved full credit, for putting the right men in charge.

  Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, wielded no authority over the military machine, but exercised wide influence on domestic policy. A mild-mannered man whom some made the mistake of underrating, Attlee conducted himself with unfailing dignity, discretion and good sense. There were many moments when he would have been justified in losing his temper with Churchill, but he remained unruffled. The prime minister was seldom less than courteous to Labour members of his government, but they were rarely invited to join his table or to weekend at Chequers. To share private moments, he almost invariably chose Conservative ministers. Even in a coalition administration, this was probably inevitable, and Attlee displayed no sign of resentment, or indeed of any wish to join Churchill’s circle.

  During the prime minister’s increasingly frequent absences abroad his deputy presided over the cabinet and war cabinet, taking the decisions that had to be made, but never overreaching his authority. There were often complaints by critics that the cabinet allowed itself to be a mere rubber-stamp, that Attlee and his colleagues failed to restrain Churchill’s excesses. But it is only necessary to consider the damage that would have been done had the Labour leader used his position to lead an opposition to the prime minister and fracture the government’s unity, to applaud his statesmanship. He believed that Churchill, for all his imperfections, was the only possible man to lead Britain through the war. He served the prime minister loyally, and chaired a host of important committees.

  Ernest Bevin towered over his socialist colleagues in the esteem not only of the public, but of Churchill. Hugh Dalton, a renegade Etonian socialist, called the Minister of Labour ‘by far the best of all my colleagues, in spite of his mountainous defects of egoism, garrulity and peasant-minded suspicion’. Bevin, sixty-two, the son of
a Somerset farm labourer, left school at eleven. Though almost uneducated, he displayed the highest intelligence and force of personality. Until co-opted into government in 1940 he had been secretary of Britain’s largest union, the Transport & General Workers. He disliked communists as much as the prime minister, and wielded his immense popular authority to curb trade union excesses as much as any man could. He deserves much of the credit for the fact that Britain mobilised its population, and especially its women, more effectively than any other belligerent nation, save possibly Russia. He was never less than blunt: Churchill was probably undismayed when Bevin once told Stafford Cripps in cabinet that ‘he didn’t know why he didn’t mind his own bloody business’.

  Sir John Anderson, as Lord President of the Council, presided over a domestic counterpart of the war cabinet. A ponderous, humourless former civil servant who had served as governor of Bengal, Anderson commanded little affection but much respect. His memory, and grasp of facts and figures, were so prodigious that a colleague once enquired whether he boasted an elephant on his coat of arms. Though he sat in the Commons as MP for the Scottish Universities, his biographer observed: ‘He never really understood the House. He naturally regarded all men, and, in particular, men in public pos-itions…as being rational in their words and actions…When this did not seem to him to be so, it distressed him and even offended his sense of propriety. “I am shocked at their irresponsibility,” he once remarked of MPs.’

  Churchill never warmed to Anderson—no one could—but he valued his abilities: ‘There is no better warhorse in the government,’ he said. Anderson acted as economic coordinator, with responsibility for wages and manpower, then became in1943—less successfully—chancellor of the Exchequer. In his invariable wing collar and formal Whitehall attire, he was nicknamed ‘Jehovah’, which caused Attlee to open a committee meeting one morning with the jocular greeting: ‘Here we all are, Jehovah’s witnesses.’ Churchill nominated Anderson as successor to the premiership in the event that both he and Eden were killed on one of their wartime journeys.

  Anderson undertook only one uncharacteristic action in his life. As a lonely widower of fifty-nine, he married a raffish young widow, Ava Wigram, whose late husband Ralph had passed secret intelligence to Churchill in the 1930s. The Andersons bought a millhouse together in Sussex, where one day he fell off a small bridge into the river. The Lord President swam round in circles in his pork pie hat, which reduced Ava to hysterical laughter. Anderson demanded angrily: ‘Would you have your husband drown?’ She was eventually persuaded to assist him. In the country, he was once observed churning butter with one hand, while doing his ministerial boxes with the other. This austere, unimaginative man, who bore responsibility with the ease of long experience, managed a host of matters that were vital, but which bored the prime minister.

  Anderson’s most notable colleague was the food minister, Lord Woolton, another outstanding figure of Britain’s war. Woolton—Frederick Marquis before his elevation—was a former boss of the department store chain John Lewis. He was not only an inspired administrator, directing the operations of 40,000 people handling the national rationing and distribution system, but also a natural communicator. Save for the prime minister, no member of the government proved more accomplished in explaining himself to the nation through the BBC’s microphones. ‘Woolton pie’, made with cheap, nutritious and—above all—available ingredients, became a lasting memory of the war for millions of people. Woolton once displayed dismay at criticism in the Lords of a ‘government in slumberland’. Hugh Dalton observed patronisingly, from the viewpoint of a career politician: ‘He has had no political training to harden his skin and his sensibilities.’

  Dalton himself, a socialist intellectual but a considerable social climber who loved to lunch with such hostesses as Lady Colefax, was moved from the Ministry of Economic Warfare to the Board of Trade in the February 1942 reshuffle, having allegedly fumbled the management of Special Operations Executive, SOE. Dalton was grieved to lose control of the sabotage organisation, which excited him, but thereafter did useful work grappling with the intractable coal industry. He was one of the best Whitehall diarists of the war, an ardent intriguer, bitchy and self-obsessed. After one of his own platform performances, he wrote: ‘I am in exceptionally good form and make a very good speech, full of impromptu jokes.’ His admiration for Churchill was not reciprocated. He was never on the guest list for Chequers, and like most of his colleagues seldom saw the prime minister privately.

  Herbert Morrison was a controversial Home Secretary, not much esteemed by his colleagues, least of all Bevin, with whom he feuded. Morrison, a World War I conscientious objector, had made his reputation in London local government. In Whitehall, his conceit was deemed to exceed his abilities. Lord Leathers as Minister of War Transport, by contrast, a peacetime shipping magnate, was highly regarded by almost everyone except Alan Brooke. A group of notably talented civil servants and academics supported the cabinet team, the economist Maynard Keynes prominent among them. Beaverbrook complained that the government was run by ‘the three profs—Cherwell, Keynes and [the economist Lionel] Robbins’.

  Churchill was often criticised for taking insufficient interest in domestic affairs. Yet he seems to deserve full credit for ensuring that those to whom he entrusted them were, almost without exception, men of notable ability. The British people were exasperated by petty restriction. Some factories suffered from poor management, outdated production methods, lack of quality control and a recalcitrant workforce—shortcomings which had hampered the nation’s economic progress through the previous half-century. But many industries achieved remarkable results, and reaped the harvest of Britain’s astonishing wartime record of scientific innovation. The overall achievement was impressive.

  Wartime unity was a considerable reality. The majority of the British people remained staunch. Yet class tensions ran deep. Significant groups, above all shop-floor workers, displayed disaffection. Sections of Britain’s industrial workforce perceived no contradiction between supporting Churchill and the crusade against Nazism, while sustaining the class struggle which had raged since the beginning of the century. Strikes were officially outlawed for the duration by the government’s March 1941 Essential Work Order, but legislation failed to prevent wildcat stoppages, above all in coal pits, shipyards and aircraft plants, often in support of absurd or avaricious demands. At the depth of the Depression, in 1932, just 48,000 working days were lost to strikes in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding industries. In 1939, by contrast, 332,000 days were lost; in 1940, 163,000; 1941, 556,000; 1942, 526,000; 1943, 635,000; 1944, 1,048,000; 1945, 528,000. This was a better record than that achieved in 1917, when stoppages in the same industries cost three million days of production. Nonetheless, it suggests a less than wholehearted commitment to the war effort in some factories, also manifested by dockyard workers who, to the disgust of ships’ crews, were guilty of systematic pilferage, including on occasion lifeboat rations.

  Few workers broke ranks during the Dunkirk period, but as the war news improved they perceived less urgency about the struggle for national survival. ‘I gather that production is not nearly good enough,’ wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam in December 1940, ‘that the work people in airplane and other gov[ernment] factories are beginning to go ca’canny; that the dockers at the ports are giving trouble…communists active—I only hope that much of this gossip is exaggerated, but it is alarming nonetheless.’ In September 1941, when Churchill visited the Armstrong-Siddeley factory at Coventry, where Whitley bombers were being manufactured, he was warned that the plant was ‘a hotbed of communism’. Jock Colville wrote:

  ‘I was disgusted to hear that their production tempo had not really grown until Russia came into the war.’ Nine thousand men at Vickers-Armstrong in Barrow went on unofficial strike in a dispute over piecework rates. When a tribunal found against them, the strike committee held a mass meeting at a local football ground, and put forward a motion suggesting that the
men should resume work ‘under protest’. This was overwhelmingly defeated, and the dispute dragged on for weeks.

  Of eight serious strikes in the aircraft industry between February and May 1943, six concerned pay, one was sparked by objections to an efficiency check on machine use, and one by refusal to allow two fitters to be transferred to different sections of the same shop. There were twenty-eight lesser stoppages prompted by disputes about canteen facilities, alleged victimisation of a shop steward, the use of women riveters, and refusal by management to allow collections for the Red Army during working hours. A report on De Havillands at Castle Bromwich noted ‘a marked absence of discipline…slackness…difficulty in controlling shop stewards’. Ernest Bevin reported that the aircraft industry ‘had failed to improve its productivity in proportion to the amount of labour supplies’. A total of 1.8 million working days were lost during 1,785 disputes in 1943, a figure which rose to 3.7 million in 2,194 disputes in 1944.

  ‘Strikes continue to cause much discussion,’ declared a 1943 Home Intelligence report. ‘The majority feeling is that strike action in wartime is unjustified…Fatigue and war-weariness, combined with the belief that we are “out of the wood” and victory now certain, are thought by many to account for the situation.’ American seamen arriving in Britain were shocked by the attitudes they encountered among dockers. Walter Byrd, chief officer of the US merchantman SS J. Marshall, ‘made very strong criticism of the attitude of stevedores and other dockworkers in the port of Glasgow. He accused them of complete indifference to the exigencies of any situation, however urgent.’ Byrd complained to harbour security officers that many trucks and tanks were being damaged by reckless handling during offloading. It was decided to dispatch some shipworkers to work in US yards on British vessels. At a time when passenger space was at a premium, service chiefs were enraged when these men refused to sail without their wives—and their demand was met: ‘I do not see why the country sh[oul]d not be mobilised and equality of sacrifice demanded,’ a senior army officer commented indignantly.